The Washington Post reports from Portel, Brazil:

Over the past two decades, a new financial commodity known as carbon credits has become one of the world’s most important tools in the fight against climate change. Companies and organizations seeking to offset their emission of carbon have spent billions of dollars on them.

The Amazon rainforest, because of its size and global environmental importance, has increasingly drawn those pursuing carbon credits. Here, these people are called “carbon cowboys.”

They’ve launched preservation projects across the region, generating carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Those credits, in turn, have been purchased by some of the world’s largest corporations. The projects have helped transform the Brazilian Amazon into an epicenter of a largely unaccountable global industry with sales, according to market research, of nearly $11 billion.

But a six-month Washington Post investigation shows that many of the private ventures have repeatedly and, authorities say, illegally laid claim to publicly protected lands, generating enormous profits from territory they have no legal right to and then failing to share the revenue with those who protected or lived on the land. The use of such lands to sell credits also contributes little to reducing carbon emissions.

The frequency with which these projects make use of public property, the amount of land involved and the value of the credits generated have not been previously reported.

The Post found that more than half of all carbon credit forest preservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon overlapped with public territories. The amount of public land claimed by these private ventures was more than 78,000 square miles, six times the size of Maryland. The businesses that purchased the carbon credits from the private land ventures to offset emissions included major international companies: Netflix, Air France, Delta Air Lines, Salesforce, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Airbnb, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Boston Consulting Group, Spotify, Boeing. [Continue reading…]